Breaking Bad Recap: Why Don't You Just Die?

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Breaking Bad Recap: Why Don't You Just Die?

Image: AMC/Ursula Coyote

Image: AMC/Ursula Coyote

At one point early in the show, the terminally ill Walter White calculates exactly how much money he needs to make in order to ensure that his family is financially secure after his death: $737,000. Once he earns it, he can finally stop. Later, after Walt starts earning big bucks selling meth in the Czech Republic, Skyler takes Walt to the storage space where $80 million dollars of his money sits stacked in a perfect square. “How much is enough?” she asks.

There is no answer to that question, and there never has been. That's the lie of hunger, the lie of ambition, the lie of addiction: that it's ever going to end, that it's ever going to be enough. It's an asymptote forever approaching zero and never reaching it.

If you'd like to hear the voice of Heisenberg speak through a different mouth this episode, just listen to Todd. While Uncle Jack seems content with the tens of millions of dollars they stole from Walt, Todd isn't done with the meth game, not while there's more money to make. “No matter how much you got, how do you turn your back on more?” Behold the true heir apparent to Heisenberg.

Last week, the show finally pulled the trigger on its big reveal, the one that has been hanging over our heads like the Sword of Damocles since the very beginning: What happens when everyone finds out about Walt? Well, turns out the answer is that it ruins all of their lives and it's awful. Not surprisingly, the suspense that lead up to the revelation was more exciting than its aftermath, which involves a lot of hiding and crying and not being able to do anything at all.

The whole world knows about Heisenberg now, but as he hides out with Saul, Walt refuses to grasp exactly how screwed he is. Instead, he keeps insisting the same thing he insists every time something insane happens: "This changes nothing.” Hank is dead; Walt is the subject of a national manhunt; he just turned Jesse over to be tortured and killed, and nothing has changed? You can sit on the beach and insist that the tide isn't coming in, but it doesn't mean you won't drown.

When Saul refuses to get involved his latest completely suicidal plan – putting out a hit on Jack and the neo-Nazi crew – Walt flips the Heisenberg switch, stepping towards Saul with that familiar, cold fury in his eyes: "You remember what I told you? It's not over till..." And then he doubles over in a coughing fit, his attempt at menace collapsing into something small and pitiable. "It's over," says Saul, walking away. It's like the time Walt stood up to the kids bullying Flynn, but in reverse.

It was easy to sympathize with Walt in the early days, when the nebbish, down-on-his-life underdog looked down the barrel of a cancer diagnosis and suddenly decided to start taking risks and kicking ass. Or at least, that was how Walt wanted to see it, and maybe how some of us wanted to see it too. But there's a lot of false and very convenient conflation in that origin story. Nothing that says living fearlessly and fully has to entail manufacturing methamphetamine, or that self-actualization has to involve destroying the lives of everyone around you. Those were choices Walt made, and they weren't brave; they were profoundly selfish.

The truth is something closer to what Todd Van Der Werff describes in his Salon article on Walter White's societal privilege. This wasn't just about Walt reclaiming a sense of power in his life; it was about taking power from other people and refusing to acknowledge the harm and inequality it created. It was about Walt's sense of thwarted entitlement, the feeling that somehow he was owed more from life simply by merit of being him, and that he was justified in doing whatever was necessary to get it. Walt doesn't see it that way, naturally – he earned everything he got! – and he reacts angrily (and even lethally) to those who suggest otherwise.

Remember the final, fateful words of Mike? “All of this falling apart is on you. We had a good thing, you stupid son of a bitch! We had Fring, we had a lab, we had everything we needed, and it all ran like clockwork. You could have shut your mouth, cooked, and made as much money as you ever needed! It was perfect, but no. You just had to blow it up. You, and your pride and your ego!” Walt responds by shooting him in the stomach.

And then there's conversation Walt has with Gretchen when she learns he has been falsely claiming that she is paying his medical bills. He refuses to explain himself, instead lashing out and blaming her and Elliott for making millions after he quit the company. "I feel so sorry for you," she says. "Fuck you," he replies.

Looking back, that might have been the very first time we saw the true face of Heisenberg – the vindictive "sneer of cold command" that showed up during that horrible phone call to Skyler last week. While ostensibly a ploy to absolve Skyler of his crimes, it also allowed him to have his cake and eat it too: to say all the ugly things he was thinking about her without ever having to truly own them. Yes, he called Skyler a stupid bitch – but he was doing it, as always, for the family.

The phone call hasn't rendered Skyler blameless, however. The episode opens during a meeting with the prosecutors, who want Walt but are willing to settle for whatever charges they can stick on Skyler. “Rack your brain, and see if you can come up with something we can use.” She can't think of anything – at least until Todd stops by Holly's nursery room with a bunch of black-masked men to tell Skyler not to say anything about Lydia. Yes, Todd is terrifying, but I'm worried Skyler will use it anyway, because it's the only leverage she has. (I might be the only one still worried about Holly, but I am still worried about Holly.)

And not just because she is wearing dogs that are wearing pink, although she is.

And not just because she is wearing dogs that are wearing pink, although she is.

Much of the episode is devoted to forcing people into boxes – Jesse in his cell, Walt in his cabin – and watching them grow smaller and smaller as the walls close in. Walt emerges from his extraction at an extremely remote cabin in New Hampshire, with no connection to the outside world save a monthly supply run from the man who helped him disappear. The isolation takes a toll quickly; by the second month, he's already standing by the gate when the supply run arrives, like a dog waiting for his owner. When the man turns to leave, Walt begs him to stay longer for more human contact – and offers to pay him $10,000 for two hours of his time. He gets bargained down to one. It's not the hail of bullets some readers might have wanted for Walt's comeuppance, but it might actually be crueler.

Speaking of cruel, Todd is turning the captive Jesse into his creepy human pet, chaining him to a lab where he makes 92% pure meth for Todd to hand to Lydia like a big, blue valentine. But sometimes, when Jesse is very good, Todd will give him treats like not one but *two *flavors of Ben and Jerry's ice cream, lowered into his cell in a bucket. When he is bad, well, there are consequences. After a failed escape attempt, Jesse faces his captors and shouts, “Just kill me now and get it over with!” And you almost hope that they will, because you know whatever happens after this is going to be worse. It is.

Because that's when Todd shows up at Andrea's house with his smiles and his “ma'am”s – and shoots her in the head while Jesse watches. It is awful, particularly watching the reaction from perpetual whipping boy Jesse. Somehow, though, it doesn't feel as shocking as it would have a week earlier, which is perhaps a barometer of exactly how broken everything feels on the show. Where Hank's death last episode was a devastating sucker punch, Andrea's murder just feels like another blow in a longer, more sustained beating.

Back at the cabin, Walt realizes he's not long for this world asks if the disappearer will take the remaining money in the barrel to Walt's family after he dies. “If I said yes, would you believe me?” the man asks. Even Walt, the superintendent of self-denial, isn't able to convince himself. With almost nothing left to lose, he packs $100,000 into a box, walks to the closest bar, and calls Flynn at his school to ask him to accept the package.

“Why don't you just die?” is his son's response. Flynn said those same words to Walt way back in Season 1, during the intervention over cancer treatment. At the time, it was just the angry, wounded talk of a teenager who couldn't imagine losing his father. Now it's literal truth: Flynn wishes Walt would die, because they'd all be better off without him. It's even true retroactively: The sooner the cancer had killed him, the better off they all would have been.

“It can't all have been for nothing,” says Walt. But it was. And that's it. He picks up the phone again, calls the DEA, and then orders a drink at the bar while he waits for them to show up. Guess who he sees on the TV in one of those *amazing *coincidences that occasionally transpire on this show? Gretchen and Elliott Schwartz, talking about Grey Matter, the multi-million dollar company Walt co-founded with them but never profited from. Back when they were trying to get Walt to accept money for his cancer treatment, Gretchen told Walt "that money, as far as we're concerned, belongs to you. Even the name of our company is half yours." Now that Walt is an infamous drug kingpin, however, they're singing a different tune about how inconsequential his role was. “As far as I can tell, his contribution begins and ends [with the name],” says Elliott, and you can almost hear the record scratch in Walt's mind.

Remember the reason Walt said he wanted to take out Jack and the neo-Nazis? “They stole my life's work.” Seems like there are two sets of people have done that now, at least in Walt's mind. The M60 and the ricin always seemed like an odd combination; maybe they're intended for two very different targets. Without his excuses, all Walt has left is his wounded pride, and Mike can tell you just how dangerous that can be. “The sweet, kind, brilliant man that we once knew long ago – he's gone,” says Gretchen on the TV screen, and as the music twists into a sideways remix of the theme, so is Walt, setting off to meet up with that flashforward from so long ago.

We're right back where we started at the beginning of season five, and while "Granite State" connected all the dots, it's hard to say it was a very satisfying episode. After the last one, I'm not sure it was supposed to be. Instead, it was a bleak, hour-long realization of what Saul told Walt at the beginning of the episode: “It's over.” It felt like the sip of whiskey that Walt takes at the bar before the cops come; the moment when Gus Fring paused and straightened his tie before collapsing; Mike's final, gutshot minutes, sitting on the stump.

“Stay a little longer?” Walt asks the disappearer after two months of dying alone in his cabin, begging for two hours, but settling for one. After five years, that's all any of us have left with Walt and Jesse. And it feels like time.